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Lakeland Florida News and InformationFri, 30 Jan 2015 15:03:21 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Of blasphemy, abortion, the gods we believe, and the men we knowhttp://www.lakelandlocal.com/2015/01/of-blasphemy-abortion-the-gods-we-believe-and-the-men-we-know/
http://www.lakelandlocal.com/2015/01/of-blasphemy-abortion-the-gods-we-believe-and-the-men-we-know/#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 13:08:44 +0000http://www.lakelandlocal.com/?p=21043Of blasphemy, abortion, the gods we believe, and the men we know

]]>I wonder how the global reaction to the awful murders of Parisian cartoonists would have changed if the victims were the staff of a Paris abortion clinic.

In the aftermath, people on virtually all sides of the American political and cultural scene have taken to insisting on wide republication of the cartoons lampooning the central holy figure of the global religion of Islam. These champions of free speech insist that our ostensibly secular institutions publicly support blasphemy by committing it.

On the one hand, religious extremists should not threaten people who offend their beliefs. On the other hand, nobody should offend their beliefs. The right to blasphemy should exist but only in theory. They do not believe religious extremists should be able to impose censorship by issuing threats, but given the existence of those threats, the rest of us should have the good sense not to risk triggering them.

The Muslim radical argues that the ban on blasphemy is morally right and should be followed; the Western liberal insists it is morally wrong but should be followed. Theoretical distinctions aside, both positions yield an identical outcome.

The right to blaspheme religion is one of the most elemental exercises of political liberalism. One cannot defend the right without defending the practice.

I aim to please; and sometimes blasphemy is necessary, so here you go:

That took far less courage on my part — in reality — than pointing out when a dude lied about the sexual habits of black girls in front of the City Commission. And that itself took zero courage. Yet, the very minor threat that ensued will be far greater than anything I will get in response to posting those cartoons. Je suis Charlie, I guess.

For whatever reason, our violent country’s modern customs make violent reprisal for speech quite unlikely. It’s a genuine national accomplishment. If I felt seriously threatened, would I publish these words and images? Hard to know. My country does not really force me to make that choice. I am proud of that and grateful for it.

Yeah, but they’re our terrorists

I suspect many will attribute that freedom to something in the Christian tradition. It’s often said that Christians — at least in the industrialized west — do not resort to violence when their god is mocked through speech or image. I think that’s a fairly recent truth, but a truth nonetheless. Some modern adherents of Islam do combat blasphemy with murder. That’s quite obvious.

But it’s simply not true that Christians in industrialized western countries do not resort to strategic, focused terrorism. Purpose-driven Christian terrorism has consistently and systematically targeted the entirely legal provision of abortion services — and as a byproduct, women’s reproductive health services in general.

American abortion providers have experienced life and their profession very similarly to the way that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists did. A simple fact. The anti-abortion forces who do not commit murder treat the providers of women’s reproductive health services — and the women seeking them — with same social menace that some Muslims are said to treat Jews in Paris. And they treat people they assume to oppose criminalization of abortion with a more generalized contempt designed to create moral discomfort.

On Election Day 2008, a well-known local conservative Christian activist called me a “baby-killer” to my face because I had the nerve to wear an Obama shirt while holding a sign for somebody else. This was right after I said “good morning” to her. How exactly is that different from a Parisian Muslim harassing a Parisian Jew purely on basis of tribal contempt?

At no point has the systemic, repeated murder of people providing abortions and the cruel harassment of the women seeking them caused the broader abortion criminalization movement — which includes most of the active Republican party — a moment of self-reflection. Any time any Muslim commits a crime against one of planet’s 7 billion people, many of the quiet strategic supporters of anti-abortion Christian terrorism demand that Muslims everywhere make some public demonstration about it. They demand no such thing of themselves when an ideological and religious ally does their particular dirty work for them.

Quite the contrary, they’ve marched forward, institutionalizing harassment through ultrasound laws and generally squeezing access to abortion services, which are as constitutionally protected in the United States of America as blasphemy. No conservative ever hash-tagged #IamGeorgeTiller in 2009; nor will any do so at the next anti-abortion murder or act of violence, which is certain to occur. Because it works. The abortion equivalent of publishing blasphemy cartoons so that terrorists don’t win is to escort women or doctors safely to clinics. It’s laughable to even think about Christian abortion criminalizers doing that. They want the terrorists to win — their terrorists.

To put it directly: restricting and eventually ending abortion access means much more to the mainstream anti-abortion movement than the abstract freedom of people to live without threat of terrorism. The aims of Christian anti-abortion terrorists align beautifully with the aims the broader movement. I do not have any real sense if blasphemy is as important to average religious Muslims as abortion is to conservative religious Christians. But I rather doubt it.

The god of gratification serves us all

I don’t go through this as yet another chapter of the gloomy ethnic and religious tit for tat that we always rehash after some terrible moment of criminal or political violence. I can think of no stupider abstract argument that “your religion sucks more than mine.” It’s not very far removed from “your college football team’s kids are bigger jerks than mine.”

I do this to make a point about abstract principles and the viscerally sacred. The first is rarely a match for the second. History and experience prove that endlessly.

For most people — and maybe all — personal gratification is the number one most sacred human interest. We’ll tend to find ways to call terrorism, theft, or murder that gratifies us by some other name than “terrorism”, “theft”, or “murder.” Maybe “revolution” or “taking a stand” or “not living up to our values in the past” or “sins of the father” or “2nd amendment solution” or “good luck” or “fate.” Religion is where personal gratification or personal revulsion get sanctified by the will of your personal god. And when personal gratification gets so intense that it involves your god, you’re not going find much room for compromise.

For instance, abortion criminalizers believe women who have abortions are co-conspirators in first degree child murder. They believe they live among a modern holocaust. I don’t. That’s a pretty unbridgeable gap, isn’t it?

Thus, although I do not share the sentiment, I can understand, intellectually, why abortion criminalizers either resort to violent terrorism or quietly accept the benefit of those who do. Just like I understand why slaves and freedmen revered John Brown. I can see why people who perceive climate change as the looming end of human civilization would engage in environmental terrorism. And I can certainly, intellectually, understand, how someone might think:

The right to blaspheme religion [control one’s own body and make ones own reproductive decisions] is one of the most elemental exercises of political liberalism. One cannot defend the right without defending the practice.

Perhaps drawings that mock deities do not belong in that company, but I can also understand, intellectually, how a religious fanatic can see blasphemy as a kind of murder of his or her god.

All of this leads you into closed mazes of morality and does not lend itself to the neatly balanced western liberal equations that Jonathan Chait and other capital-L political Liberals want to sell you when they race to defend and lionize Charlie Hebdo. Indeed, the Chaits of America — political Liberals — generally call for accommodation and compromise with abortion criminalizers, in spite of their strategic support of terrorism. This most likely says something about the relative power in the west of terrorism-supporting Christians and terrorism-supporting Muslims — and how capital-L political Liberalism’s principles relate to the realities of power.

None of this is new. The aims and means of the white Christian terrorists of Reconstruction aligned beautifully with the aims of run-of-the-mill white people. Before that, the terrorism of Andrew Jackson and his allies — some state-sanctioned and some not — aligned perfectly with means and aims of run-of-the-mill white settlers who wanted cheap, stolen, and in many cases, already cultivated land possessed by Indian tribes and runaway slaves. If you’re a southerner who benefitted from any generational property wealth or social solidity, I bet I can trace it directly to terrorism and land theft in the first half of the 19th century. Like me, you’re a terrorism beneficiary, complicit after-the-fact. Landed Indians, and free black people, known as maroons, were concepts the United States and America and its citizens, by and large, wanted to go away. The United States of America and its citizens used all forms of coercion — from murder to state-santioned theft — to make it happen. It should be noted that Indians and maroons were happy to engage in their own terrorism and coercion in defense of what they considered to theirs, both against the US and each other. In the end, they were simply less powerful than the United States of America.

Never, never, never undersell power, in all its myriad forms, as the key determiner of human morality.

The gods we believe; the men we know

Forget the United States, go back to the Athenian Greeks, the mythological creators of democracy and western civilization. Before they “created” western liberalism, the Athenians understood power. There’s never been a more beautiful, in its way, expression of this than the famous Athenian dialogue with Milos. It may or may not have gone down the way Thucydides reports it. But that’s almost beside the point. Athens was stronger than Milos. Both knew it. Athens was fighting Sparta (Lacedaemonia) in the Peloponnesian War after teaming up with them to defeat the Persians some years before. Milos wanted to stay neutral. Athens wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Well, then, we Athenians will use no fine words; we will not go out of our way to prove at length that we have a right to rule, because we overthrew the Persians; or that we attack you now because we are suffering any injury at your hands. We should not convince you if we did; nor must you expect to convince us by arguing that, although a colony of the Lacedaemonians, you have taken no part in their expeditions, or that you have never done us any wrong. But you and we should say what we really think, and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”

And the rhetorical/moral climax comes here:

As for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of their favor as you: for we are not doing or claiming anything which goes beyond common opinion about divine or men’s desires about human things. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first who have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you.

Small “l” liberalism, that liberalism of the west that political Liberals and political conservatives alike are supposed to broadly share, exists to combat and alter that law of nature cited by Thucydides’ Athenians. That’s why those same Athenians invented it, or so we tell ourselves.

I haven’t seen much evidence that modern political conservatives, on the whole, actually believe in western liberalism as an antidote to power, at least in America. I think they’re far more concerned with placing themselves among the powerful. By contrast, I think a large strain of American political Liberalism believes fervently in western liberalism, but somehow expects it to exist untethered from the natural realities of raw earthly tribal power.

For example, Cliven Bundy and his band of terrorists can steal from the government and point many, many guns at its agents; and nothing seems to happen. Meanwhile, a 12-year black boy in Cleveland waving a toy gun is killed on site by an agent of the state. And nothing seems to happen. Some liberals, I think, imagine some celestial jury to make this right. There isn’t one. Many conservatives of multiple religions would say their deity is the celestial jury; and it’s much harder to disprove a god than to disprove that the laws and power of man bend toward justice. Realizing this truth can cause a decent and liberal human to despair and retreat from the world. I see a certain degree of this despair among some strains of American political Liberalism. And I have very little patience for it. Other than dishonesty, I consider whininess the single worst trait for any liberal or Liberal.

That’s because true liberalism hurts. It has always hurt. A liberalism that does not hurt is bullshit, because honest liberalism is always poised against the “laws of nature,” as they relate to power. Liberalism hurts way more than illiberalism does, at least if you’re a member of the tribe with power to impose illiberalism on your enemies. It hurts because it is doomed to fail over and over again. The liberalism of the Athenians that opposed what their countrymen did to Milos — and many did, without stopping it — hurt more than the illiberalism of those who supported it. But it did not hurt as much as it did for the Milians. The Athenians killed every man and sold every woman into slavery. And ultimately, Liberal Athenians preferred their failed liberalism to death or enslavement. So do you. So do I.

My wish is for a liberalism that celebrates its victories, because they are comparatively rare. And because life cannot just be hurt. I wish for a liberalism that seeks to earn the right to enjoy good fortune if we are lucky enough to benefit from it, even if it’s the direct result of acts in the past we would consider evil in the abstract, or if someone else’s ancestors committed them. I think it would be much easier on the soul if we could all make ourselves believe in a fair and present god that apportions justice and protection over time. But I can’t do it.

I know — fully and totally — that I’m an after-the-fact beneficiary of theft, murder, and cruel tribal terrorism carried out by men and supported by women who looked a lot like me. And I live quite happily and comfortably today, largely because of that theft, murder, and cruel tribal terrorism. That’s the fundamental tension at the heart my own personal version of liberalism; so I hope you’ll excuse me if I roll my eyes over the deeply sanctimonious tones in which we call for reprinting mediocre blasphemous cartoons, even if they’ve become sacred through murder.

To pursue a joyful liberalism, one that aims for happiness and celebration among the hurt, we have to understand and respect power, as a force that both enables and destroys liberalism.

Today, power can take many forms — sheer physical might, heavy weaponry, wealth, attractiveness, shame, voting, even courtrooms and law. I would argue that diffusion of the forms of effective power may be the greatest historical accomplishment of small-l and big-L liberalism. Likewise, the willingness to die conveys disproportionate power, for liberalism and illiberalism alike. Some of the greatest liberal and Liberal heroes — Jesus Christ and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Peter Hagan — proved that. So did the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and murderers.

]]>http://www.lakelandlocal.com/2015/01/of-blasphemy-abortion-the-gods-we-believe-and-the-men-we-know/feed/0It’s deeply immoral to treat college football players like politicianshttp://www.lakelandlocal.com/2015/01/its-deeply-immoral-to-treat-college-football-players-like-politicians/
http://www.lakelandlocal.com/2015/01/its-deeply-immoral-to-treat-college-football-players-like-politicians/#commentsThu, 08 Jan 2015 14:31:51 +0000http://www.lakelandlocal.com/?p=20992It’s deeply immoral to treat college football players like politicians

]]>You hear this lament often in modern politics: “The public scrutiny of every aspect of a candidate’s private and professional life discourages good people from running and serving.”

And it’s true to a point. When you freely choose to pursue state power and a paycheck through the political process, you do become the property of the political media complex — a petty, gossipy, and sometimes useful mechanism for examining a candidate or appointee.

But you never hear this about our other great American tribal entertainment: “The public scrutiny of every aspect of a bigtime college football player’s private and non-professional life discourages talented 18-year-olds from playing or engaging in normal life.”

And yet, today, the teenagers wearing our favorite shirts generally receive more day-to-day media scrutiny of their private lives and personal behavior than the fully grown adults who want to rule us. Be honest. You know far more about the personal foibles of Florida State football players than you do Florida state legislators.

That is morally insane; and it won’t stop. There are too many clicks and too much money in reporting Marcus Mariota’s speeding ticket. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the insanity. And the twisted immorality of the fake moralizers who drive it.

Where it starts

Major college football rests on original sin so comprehensive that it comes with multiple parts. To blame this sprawling structural immorality on the kids who play and suffer for our entertainment is to blame the apple for Eve eating it.

Let’s take a quick run through.

1) The business of bigtime football forces young men, most of whom are black and many of whom come from challenging economic and social circumstances, to take part in the most dangerous, consuming and debilitating unpaid internship in the modern American workplace. (This likely says something rather pointed about race; but we don’t even have to get into that here.) Unlike any other internship or apprenticeship in history, these young men are, in and of themselves, the product that our centers of higher learning sell for profit and alumni development.

If music operated under the same corrupt rules as football, Lorde would still be singing for free while her record company put her up in a dorm and gave her some food and cashed in on her talent. She would have much less at risk, too. Unlike Lorde’s voice and creativity, a football player’s speed, strength, and health are highly perishable. Their clocks always tick; every moment spent wearing the garnet and gold or orange and blue is a moment spent not securing their financial future with the very lucrative skills some of them possess. 30 is old; very little money is guaranteed; and injuries can last a lifetime. Death comes early.

2) Our centers of higher learning — say again, our centers of higher learning — often celebrate and recruit these young men specifically for their violence and aggression. Go listen to how often coaches talk with relish about the personal “violence” a safety or linebacker brings to a defense. Or how so-and-so is “violent” runner. Not strength, not roughness. Violence. It is an act of almost psychotic will to throw your body against a 230-pound running back running free through a secondary. And vice versa. And yet we expect every single one of these teenagers in our favorite shirts to turn off that violent intensity the moment the whistle blows and in every confrontation they have off the field. If not, they’re selfish thugs given free reign by enabling coaches. After all, personal fouls reflect character, as do excessive celebrations. (Back to race again; it’s like there’s a recurring theme here.)

Let me tell you something: it’s those of us who watch these games, and cheer these kids on, and spend money on the entire spectacle, who most deserve description as selfish thugs.

3) These unpaid internships — based in large part on the actively demanded aggression and violence of 20-year-olds — today come with the added benefit of unlimited national, public scrutiny of that same 20-year-old from which aggression and violence are demanded. And those 20-year-olds are not allowed to respond. They have to just take it.

Put aside Jameis Winston’s rape accusation for a moment. (My detailed take on his lack of guilt here. The police, the state attorney’s office, and a former Florida Supreme Court justice agree. And that’s before his rather vicious lawyer ever gets to cross examine the accuser.) Winston was literally the only student in America punished for shouting a stupid, sexually explicit, and misogynistic meme that many other students were shouting as a kind of weird public joke. He was publicly — and laughably — accused of point-shaving in the first half of the Louisville game. ESPN accused him by insinuation of signing autographs for money. That ought to be perfectly legal; but it turns out there was no accusation that he ever took money and plenty of evidence that the autographs in question were faked. Adults who know nothing about him as a person criticized and critiqued him multiple times for his exuberance on the field — his every reaction scrutinized as an indicator of his character. Believe me, my pick-up basketball behavior could not stand up to that scrutiny. Competitive, emotional people often make spectacles of themselves. Funny how nobody says Tom Brady is out-of-control when he goes after a receiver or coach.

All of that happened in just the last four months. And Winston couldn’t do anything but take it. If he had made the mistake of talking back, the click-baiters would have used that too. That’s because none of it was personal. All business. Winston and this FSU team drive web traffic and ratings. Period. At least there’s a massive payday coming for Winston at the end of this. Very few major college football players get that. But they all get to shame their families on SportsCenter if they screw up, even if they’re mediocre players.

The New York Times, which refused to even discuss the piles of exculpatory evidence in the Winston rape case, camped out two reporters in Tallahassee for weeks. (I guess ISIS was adequately covered.)

These camped out reporters came up with a serious car crash that two starting defensive backs ran away from and then returned to in 20 minutes. Police did not file charges or check for DUI. Perhaps they should have. But consider this: I was the victim of a hit-and-run crash last year in which the young woman fled and never came back. I chased her, got a tag number, and eventually the police found her days later. They didn’t arrest her; and frankly, I was OK with that. I didn’t want to ruin her life. Several years back, an obviously drunk woman flipped her car literally in front of my house on the most residential of streets. No breathalyzer; no charges.

Police discretion exists. Should football players not benefit from it simply because they are football players? Why is it that the only people for whom police discretion becomes a scandal are high powered athletes (mostly football players) and high-powered public officials?

ESPN recently did a blanket public records request of Tallahassee police that sought any mention of 300 current or former athletes in police reports. Any mention at all. Victim. Witness. Anything. For what? To prove what? If they did it for every major college football program, it might provide some relative reporting value. But for one?

It would be fascinating to pick 300 male names at random at FSU and do a similar blanket search, just like it would be fascinating to see the NYT camp out two reporters at Princeton’s eating clubs and document the behavior there over a period of time. Indeed, it might be interesting to run every New York Times reporter’s name through a records search.

Fans — and specifically reporters and pundits — tend to justify this withering scrutiny of kids by saying 1) Players get a free education. 2) They represent their schools, which is some kind of solemn responsibility rather than an unpaid, forced marketing gig that helps swell endowments and administrative salaries. 3) They’re supposed to be leaders and role models. 4) They know what they’re getting into. No one forces them. And they get to feel the joy of playing for us adoring fans.

Now compare that to the justification for scrutinizing the character of the fully grown adults seeking and exercising political power. 1) They want to rule us. 2) They have the power to send us to war and raise our taxes. 3) They control paramilitary police forces that have the power to kill us without repercussion at the hint of any resistance, as the late unpleasantness makes clear. 4) And we’re going pay them quite a bit of our tax money.

Makes for interesting juxtaposition, doesn’t it? And yet, you hear more complaints from society about the scrutiny given to adult politicians than the scrutiny college football players endure.

Who needs to get taken over the knee?

I despise punching down; but I’m going to do it for a moment to make a point. Meet Ray Beasock. He’s a college sports reporter/columnist for The Ledger who ekes out a living in a precarious industry by writing for money about the athletic exploits of muscular teenagers and very young adults.

Here’s how Beasock helpfully summarized it, along with a bonus Jameis Winston gloss:

It’s ESPN’s fault that your star quarterback was involved in a rape investigation, got caught stealing crab legs and stood up on a table in the student union and shouted a vulgar phrase?

It’s the SEC’s fault that one of your starting running backs is being investigated for domestic violence against his eight-month pregnant girlfriend and was being questioned for another incident where a former Marine was robbed by an associate of the running back?

No, Jimbo. Just no.

It’s like the players, as flesh and blood kids, don’t exist. They’re just arguing points. They don’t have names. They’re just star quarterback and starting running back. Notice the distinction between star and starter. Not human beings, football players, identified by their hierarchy on the team.

If they were more than just arguing points, more than just their positions, if they were people; or if Beasock performed his job with minimal professionalism, he might have mentioned anywhere in that column that Williams was not a suspect in the robbery. But he didn’t. That wasn’t important to him. This is particularly significant because Williams is from Polk County, a local boy. I wonder how many times dating back to high school that Williams freely gave his time for interviews or pictures to The Ledger, a private business, which then turned that donation into money Williams would never see. However many times he did so, it wasn’t enough to earn Williams a simple “not a suspect” from Beasock.

I asked Beasock on Twitter later if he had read the Winston police reports.

Here’s our brief conversation.

@ItsBEASOCK hi ray. Have you read through the Winston rape allegations reports or any close analysis of them?

Note the professional casualness from someone paid to carry on mass communications with the public. “I just think…” Can you imagine Rick Rousos or Jeremy Maready saying, “I just think Lisa Womack is a bad chief and needs to be fired.” You gotta do the work to earn that, man. An attentive editor would tell you that.

Writing about people’s lives on the sports page comes with the same moral and professional obligations as writing about them on A1 or B1.

For the record, the woman who posted the picture of the bruises refused to cooperate with police. The investigation went away. I have no idea what happened to cause the bruises. I do know that police only investigated because an FSU official tipped them off to the Facebook posting. And it’s impossible to imagine that an FSU official would forward an unnamed Facebook allegation against any other of the 30K or more students at FSU who don’t play football. The only reason Ray Beasock or anyone else knows anything about this is because Karlos Williams plays football. That’s the only remote news value. You can consider it a good thing that unpaid football makes it news if you want; but you damn sure can’t say players get less scrutiny and more benefit of the doubt from the university.

A little simple reflection by a professional columnist would make that obvious. But Beasock was too lazy. He wanted to use the nameless young men in pretty men shirts to write this:

Isn’t it your job to mold these sometimes troubled young kids into upstanding, responsible men? I understand that mistakes happen and people choose to do the wrong thing, but deflecting away from the kids and blaming the media does a disservice to the kids you’re coaching and the program itself.

Football coaches are often referred to by their players as “father figures.” Maybe it’s time, Jimbo, that you started putting some of these misbehaving kids over your knee instead of giving them a slap on the wrist.

An editor should have taken you over the knee, Ray. I certainly would have — for the inexcusable misleading robbery reference alone. But also for the flabby metaphors. Exactly what would taking Karlos Williams over Jimbo’s knee look like? And the moral cliches and complete lack of acknowledgment that Ray Beasock makes a living — feeds his family if he has one — off the blood left behind by treating kids like politicians. He’s a vulture, as surely as I am for spending my money on it. But I know it. And I’m not trying to blame coaches or kids I’ve never met for it.

If I were Beasock’s editor, I would have suggested a much better column subject. Is Karlos Williams a “great kid,” as Jimbo said when the story broke? A friend of mine found that quote offensive for some reason — as if “great kids” are incapable of harming women or anyone else. I myself have no idea if Karlos Williams is a “great kid;” but I’ve read in many places that that the public adults around him — reporters, coaches, administrators — like him. Moreover, I have no idea what “great kid” even means. Not having premarital sex? Saying “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am” in public? Using violence to fight kids who bully other kids? I tend to think there really is no such thing as “great kid” or “bad kid” — just kids and personalities and circumstances and consequences. “Sometimes troubled” describes every kid, indeed, every person, I’ve ever met.

I don’t think anybody deserves to be publicly defined by — in Williams’s case — a shadowy suggestion of what might be his worst moment. Playing football certainly isn’t a legitimate reason to do that to a college student.

Moreover, that better column would actually wrestle with what’s best for Karlos Williams and his family. If you’re going to take Jimbo to the woodshed for his “molding” skills, shouldn’t you give half a shit about the putty? Especially if he’s from your local coverage area.

Morality and power

I’m going after Ray Beasock here simply because I can. I don’t know him any more than he knows Jimbo Fisher or Jameis Winston. So I’m being unfair and a bully. Without question.

I’m going after him because I can’t do anything about the New York Times (still powerful) or ESPN (all powerful). The both have the luxury of indifferent beaks, as Yeats put it.

They have the power to define almost anyone they choose, to use them however they want. You’re largely at their mercy, the same way FSU football players are. I suspect Oregon is the only major football program immune to ESPN’s (and maybe NYT’s) blanket scrutiny. Not because of virtue; because of Nike. In the world of sports business, Nike is a superpower that rivals ESPN. It owns Oregon. So you’re not going to see any blanket requests for police reports. I’m not saying that when things bubble to the surface that they won’t get reported, like Mariota’s speeding ticket; I’m saying ESPN and NYT won’t create the bubbles themselves. Prove me wrong.

And let’s be clear: Oregon has multiple kids perfectly comfortable mocking rape accusations with the FSU chop on the field in front of cameras after a game that 28 million people watched. “No means no,” to the tune of the chop. They were perfectly comfortable doing so despite the fact that three Oregon basketball players got kicked off campus recently in a rape case, the details of which I know nothing about.

Check it out. Do you think these fellows are making a pointed anti-rape statement? Did Oregon’s culture of win-at-all-costs produce this?

How does that compare with Winston’s meme shout, which, while lewd, was not pointedly vicious? Which is worse? Why? Winston got suspended for a huge game that almost wrecked FSU’s season. What’s happened to these kids? Hear a peep about that comparison from the ESPN freakshow complex? From any of the brand name reporters or talkers? Nope. Meanwhile, we have spent a lot of time assessing the percentage of FSU players who shook hands post game.

Again, kids, personalities, circumstances, consequences. I suspect there is very little variation among major college programs in the “quality” of kids recruited and put on the field. I see no evidence of any major schools that do not have win-at-all-costs cultures. Ask Muschamp. This “my kids are better than your kids” thing is absurd.

Yet I encountered quite a bit of moral smugness in green out at the Rose Bowl — including one rape lecture through a port-a-potty and a morality interrogation from the woman sitting immediately in front of me after they were up by 30 points. (In fairness, the rest of the Ducks around me were pretty awesome, and we enjoyed each other.) Nike will most likely make sure that smugness can continue — but one never knows for sure. Be careful about it, Ducks. Kids do stupid and dangerous things — yours, too.

And morality in college football — as in life — is very, very often a function of power more than anything else. I have zero illusions about that. And it contributes to my relative happiness. Like I said, I know I can’t do anything but add to web traffic for ESPN and the NYT reporters and gossip columnists.

But Ray Beasock is not Walt Bogdanich or Mark Schlabach or Darren Rovell or Kirk Herbstreit. Neither his title nor his institution offer him any protection from my scrutiny. In Lakeland, Florida, I have the power to define Ray Beasock, at least somewhat, to my readers and his peers by the moral and professional incompetence of that one bad column. What’s he gonna say or do? Billy’s wrong? I’m happy to discuss that in the time, place, and public forum of his choosing. In front of whomever he wants.

It sucks to have someone characterize you harshly with impunity, doesn’t it, Ray? And you’re a fully grown adult with a career and full capability to defend yourself in print. Feel free to do so.

Some questions for the football moralists

So if you’re tempted to tut tut at the coaches and unpaid kids at the center of this massive business. If you’re discouraged by the moral rot you perceive; or the greedy, selfish, dangerous players strolling through the halls of your alma mater, I have a few questions:

1) If, tomorrow, all football became flag football, I would happily re-up my FSU season tickets and consider getting Bucs tickets. I love the passing, the catching, the intricacy, the intensity, the tailgating with family and friends. You could have all of it in flag. I played in an absolutely awesome — and rough — flag football league in 8th grade. I coach non-rough flag football right now; and it is similarly awesome. You could still have roughness among big men, just like in the post in basketball. You could still have lines; you could still run. But you would radically diminish the collisions — the violence. Hell, Oregon was practically playing flag football against FSU. There’s a reason they never turn the ball over; they never get hit. They play a system built to avoid hits. What might be the long-term impact of player health on making that the norm for football?

So here’s my question. Would you buy FSU or UF season tickets if football was flag? Are you willing to alter the aesthetic of a game to keep kids alive longer?

2) If colleges get together and decide tackle football is morally incompatible with their missions of education and ban it, would you protest? If they decided to dump player development where it belongs, with the multi-billion mountain of money that is the NFL, would you complain? I wouldn’t. It’s a very hard move to argue with. Grafting unpaid football onto the college experience is simply impossible to defend with anything else but, “Man, it sure is fun” and “Man, it sure gets boosters to cough up money.” It’s impossible to defend with anything but consumer selfishness. Much like wasting water on your St. Augustine grass lawn is impossible to morally defend. Or eating factory chicken. Or participating in the carbon economy — if you have any ability not to do these things. I do all of them except water St. Augustine grass. So I guess football is actually a comparably small immorality.

3) If we can’t make it flag; and big colleges don’t stop playing it (which they won’t), would you support creation of a “football” major? This would be designed to “meet kids where they are” when they come to college to sacrifice their bodies as investment for possible long-term pay because they can’t really do it anywhere else. That’s the phrase Mary Willingham, the University of North Carolina’s academic fraud whistleblower, used in discussing what’s required academically for many — but by no means all — elite athletes.

“I’ve sat with these kids,” Willingham continued, referring to heavily recruited athletes. “Some of them can barely read. We have to meet them where they’re at and teach them to read.”

We increasingly expect college to function as occupational training. I think that’s a terrible development, but it is what it is. Football and bigtime sports as a whole is massive, massive business. In a world where we have hotel and restaurant management or nursing or even chiropractor majors in undergrad, there’s no reason why we can’t have a specially designed football major. Players would not be required to do it; but purely academic rigor shouldn’t keep kids with great earning potential from pursuing those earnings through college, if college is the only real conduit to those earnings. And today it is. Believe me, going into the football business — playing, coaching, talking about it — is a sounder career bet than journalism.

Many, many elite athletes face this choice in college: cheat or lose your path to a real future. That’s no choice to make a 20-year-old face. All who face that choice will cheat, by the way. So would you. And which is the morally correct decision, if people depend on you?

Moreover, football is by far the most mentally challenging of major sports. Film study. Learning systems. Quick decisions. Memorizing plays. Studying opponents. Answering media questions with presence. Living with insane scrutiny. It really is great practical training for much of life. Maybe not for engineering or creative literature or particle physics. But so what? Most people aren’t engineers, novelists, or particle physicists. Playing football is a very strenuous mental activity. Only people who have not played it would say otherwise. Why should we pretend like it’s not? Where kids need help with finance and literacy, give it to them relentlessly. Allow them to stop living a lie. Ask gay people in 1970 what living a lie does to people.

4) Absent any of those first three, do you support Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion to help the undrafted kids pay for the longterm care of their knees and shoulders and joints and head injuries? We know how FSU President John Thrasher feels about that. He’s probably Florida’s most consequential Republican legislator of the last 20 years not named Bush. He’ll beam at his players and love on his coach right up until the bill for our joy comes due for those kids. You gave your all for the greater glory of Seminole Nation, and now you live with endless headaches and trashed knees? Man, I wish there was something we could do.

If you couldn’t answer yes to any of those questions — I answer yes to all of them — then spare me your morality talk, unless you are ready to just walk away from the whole corrupt enterprise. I respect your position if you do. One day I might do the same. But it will be the greedy, dishonest, self-justifying, injuring adults who drive me away — not the kids.

A lot on the line

I’ve been an FSU fan for a long time, as I’ve written before. Season tickets with my dad from 1979 to 1999. That was quite a 20 years. But no season was better than this one.

On a whim, last spring I decided to get tickets again for just 2014. And I hit the jackpot. For sheer entertainment value, for sheer stimulus of thinking about my crazy country, for sheer fun, I can’t remember any season like this. It gave me an excuse to plan two different get silly reunions with beloved long-time friends I rarely get to see. I shared the intensity of the Notre Dame and Clemson games with my family, including my 11-year-old son who had never before attended a big, loud game. I terrorized my dogs at home with completely inappropriate bellowing at the end of the Miami, Louisville, and Georgia Tech games. I saw the first kickoff of the first-ever playoff game.

I got to see this:

Transform into this:

And it all happened in the year of the first playoff and Winston and Rice and concussions and on and on and on. I paid far more attention this year to the noise machine than I had in prior years. And I came become more and more protective of the young men playing this sport for free and bringing me so much happiness. (The NFL really doesn’t interest me; I’m basically a college fan only.)

Protective is not the same as naive. Strong, aggressive young men can certainly act like assholes. I believe in showing them they are behaving like assholes. The Clemson suspension did that quite proportionally for Winston. I promise you if the lead actor in the school play shouted what Winston shouted, he or she would have faced no discipline and wouldn’t have missed a performance. Same with the $32 worth of crab legs. But that doesn’t mean I disagree with his suspensions for both. In a decent world, punishment follows crime and then ends. You don’t keep getting punished with insults and lies for the rest of your life. But we don’t live in decent world.

The more I thought about all of this stuff, one thing became very clear to me: these kids carry only the illusion of power. Some of them may think they run campus just because rich white men build big stadiums for them to play in, and some young women find them attractive. But on the street, away from the lights, a significant percentage of them look to the world no different than Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown. And the world is always just one big fuck-up away from coming for them. Their power derives entirely from the power their institutional settings afford them.

It wasn’t even Winston who brought this home to me. He seems to come from a stable middle class family and could easily be a college student without football. It was the car crash involving P.J Williams and Ronald Darby, which was a solid piece of journalism by the NYT if you put aside the paper of record’s priorities.

Williams was driving. He was at fault in a pretty serious crash at almost 3 a.m. Both men fled the scene but returned 20 minutes later of their own accord. But Williams wasn’t tested for DUI; and he probably should have been. Here’s the part of the story that leapt out at me.

At one point, [the other driver] Mr. Keith said, a football player — he did not know which one — apologized to him for fleeing and explained that they “had a lot on the line.” The player was “sort of rambling” until a female friend told him to stop talking, Mr. Keith said.

How many 20-year-olds at FSU, or really anywhere that the upper middle class predominates, think I have a lot on the line in the immediate aftermath a serious crash? Even a DUI crash? They may be scared of getting in trouble, or shaken up, or deeply annoyed by whatever inconvenience is coming next. But how many really say, God, have I just destroyed my future? I can’t imagine my kids would. The world will not be coming for them if they get in a wreck with no serious injuries, even a DUI; they know intuitively they can recover. Maybe they’ll have to place an uncomfortable call to me; but I’m not that scary.

That’s how powerful these big men on campus are. One bad moment, and they know they can be on SportsCenter or the stars of an NYT story about the corruption of their institution. One bad moment, and the interests of the institution are no longer served by having them around. Their only power comes in serving the interests of the powerful institution for whom they are performing a very violent and dangerous unpaid internship. That power can be revoked at any time; so it’s actually powerlessness.

P.J. Williams and Ronald Darby, as humans, matter very little here. Go read the Times story yourself. Like Beasock, the NYT uses them as nothing more than props. You live under that kind of pressure and powerlessness at 20 — live as a public prop — and tell yourself with certainty you wouldn’t panic and run if you found yourself in this situation.

As it turns out, Williams and Darby avoided much of that. Call it luck; call it cheating, call it corruption, call it good policing or bad policing, call it FSU actually caring about the flesh and blood kids it sends out on the field to market for it. I don’t know what to call it.

But Williams, like Winston, made it through this season. Now both have declared for the NFL draft. Williams has a major pay day coming; Winston has multi-generational-family-altering payday coming. Their investment of their bodies and effort in this unpaid internship will have a significant return.

Maybe you look at that sequence of events and consider it everything that’s wrong with college football. I consider it way, way down the list.

I really hope these kids manage the payday they’ve earned wisely; because my own mild investment in them paid off beautifully. I got much more out them than they got out of me. I thank them for it and wish them nothing but good luck. That goes for all the kids playing this game, not just the ones in my favorite shirt.

]]>At my kid’s school, which is very small, lockdown drills consist of herding the children into two rooms, turning off the lights, and remaining quiet for five minutes. That’s fine as far as it goes. But knowing the size and layout of the school, I severely doubt the adults will have any time at all to execute this maneuver in the terrible event of a shooter.

Bigger schools would have a better chance, using the intercom system, to communicate a mass lockdown and actually get classroom doors locked with kids behind them before the shooter can work his (it almost certainly will be a he) way through the facility.

But put aside the question of time; why is concentrating children in a confined space considered the core of lockdown protocols? It must be the locked doors, right? Common sense tells you to hunker down in a secure space and wait for help. That make sense.

But where is it written that the shooter can’t breach the secure space? As I understand it, concentrations of people/children in confined spaces made Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech as deadly as they were. Locked doors only make sense if you can keep them locked; and if you can secure other points of access. If you can’t, terrible things happen.

Why doesn’t it make as much, or more, sense, in a purely pragmatic sense, to tell children to run for their lives? It’s harder to hit a moving target; and, depending on the set up of the school, there could be multiple pathways to escape. Wouldn’t playing a deadly form of dodgeball/hide and seek occupy and frustrate him more effectively, and thus buy more time for police to arrive, than sitting and waiting for him and hoping he can’t find a way through a window or shoot off a lock? What about organizing a group bumrush of the shooter, especially if he gets inside the locked room?

Admittedly, I don’t waste much time studying the tactics of school shooting defense. But I feel certain that in multiple circumstances, run-for-your-lives/group attack would be a more effective approach than hunker down in place. At my kid’s school, I think it’s absolutely an open question as to whether hunker down in place is at all realistic.

And yet, I certainly do not want us practicing run-for-your-life lockdown drills. That’s because the best defense against a school/mass shooting remains its unlikeliness to happen. The second best defense is staying alive until police arrive. And there is simply no way to know ahead of time the best mechanism for staying alive in any given situation. Because every school and person is different, the variables involved in every mass shooting incident make it sui generis. There is no such thing as “a school shooting” or “a mass shooting.” We should give them names, like hurricanes. They are all specific to themselves — from the shooter, to the geography, to the weaponry, to age and presence of mind of the quarry. In fact, all mass shootings of which I’m aware have exactly three things in common: a gun and a male and race for armed help to arrive. Everything else is unknowable fate.

I think, as a species capable of feeling dread, we have a very difficult time with that notion, especially concerning kids. Hunkering down may or may not provide the most statistically sound approach to surviving a particular event. But it doesn’t really matter; because it’s definitely the only countermeasure we, as a society, feel comfortable making our kids practice. The Jewett drill demonstrates that clearly.

We are right to feel that way. The actual Jewett drill that went awry was bad enough; can you imagine, Now children, this is when you run for your lives or Now children, this is when we form a flying wedge to attack the crazy person with legally-issued instrument of mass death.

We don’t want to admit — police don’t want to admit — that living and dying in “an active shooter” situation is a matter of caprice. So the police give us something for our kids to do and tell us it’s preparing them for what amounts to counterinsurgency warfare. Our military trains adult men and women for weeks and months to control emotions and function with discipline under conditions of war. And you still never know how a soldier will function under fire until it happens. Elementary or middle schoolers? After two drills a year? When it comes to an assault on the school itself, this is mostly theater. But that theater does have some value. If hunkering down gives us the illusion of preparation for the unpreparable, then we’re all probably better off. The less our kids think about the boogeyman of a school shooting, the better it is.

But because this is all theater that serves — intentionally or unintentionally — to ease human anxiety, we should not ratchet up the realism to increase the anxiety, like the Jewett drill did. The more “realistic” the drill, the more it fails in what it’s really about, providing a sense of security and authority that doesn’t really exist. And that’s why Chief Bird or other police officers should not use the, “you’d be dead now” line on classrooms that fail to properly execute the hunker down protocols during a drill. Correct them, sure. But the more a kid entertains the idea of dying at school, the worse it is for that kid, the more fear intrudes on learning and education. And what’s the security trade-off? Closer adherence to a technique that we have no way of knowing will work in a real incident? That’s a bad trade-off.

While I’m OK with basic lockdown drills as useful theater, a sane country would spend much more time attempting to reduce the number of times that a man assaults a public institution or workplace.

School shootings are the collision of two great American themes — egalitarian idealism and armed sovereignty of the individual. The greatest achievement of one — our vast network of public schools and facilities — is vulnerable to the worst aspects of the other — the ease with which very dangerous people get instruments of death.

At this point in time, those that worship the second, including most police officers and law enforcement leaders, are completely willing to endure periodic carnage if attempting to stop or reduce it it involves any regulation of gun ownership. Period. Cops love guns, for the most part. Especially in the south. And today, they have more political power than I do in this democracy. A simple fact. We’ve seen quite clearly recently the power that our police and their leaders have to use lethal violence with impunity. Very, very few people ever actively seek to reduce their power. A less violent America, with many fewer guns, would reduce police power. And they know it, I suspect.

This is not to say with certainty that any regulation of gun ownership would dent the problem of mass shootings. Indeed, I think there is almost no chance it would affect it immediately. There are somewhere around 300 million firearms in this country. Any ban we might impose, which no one wants anyway, would just create massive criminality and chaos in the way prohibition always does. It wouldn’t stop somebody from getting his hand on of those 300 million weapons and doing something awful. That gun is out of the holster, so to speak.

I do think over time a licensing scheme — treating guns like cars and finding a way to link mental illness and gun ownership — could make a difference. But I don’t know that for certain. I have much greater certainty, based on clear historical precedent, that ending drug prohibition would reduce every day violence. But mass shootings are different animals.

I do know that a handgun is the most efficient means ever invented for converting a flash of anger or fear or confusion or insanity or teen squabble at a Christmas parade into mass death. We should try to make it less efficient. But we won’t. Instead, we’ll keep telling ourselves we’re preparing our children for the horrors of the world we’re afraid to change by huddling them in rooms twice a year.

]]>Finally, we’re beginning to get a granular level account of how the Jewett drill came to occur–and the information vacuum that followed. It is a generally depressing (but in some ways encouraging) portrait of how human nature, hierarchical organizations, and state power too often interact with each other.

At the micro-level, it’s a story of how the Jewett School Resource Officer and another WHPD officer conflated two different concepts:

1) An unannounced lockdown drill, which the School District ordered for all schools, according to Winter Haven Police Chief Charlie Bird. This should not have involved weapons.

2) An active shooter scenario drill, like one that occurred over the summer at an empty school that the Jewett SRO and a huge number of school and police officials watched live via camera.

Confronted with the first order, which came directly to resource officers from the School District’s Safe School Department, headed by Capt. Loyd Stewart, the two WHPD officers apparently decided to echo the spirit of the drill they had witnessed over the summer. That’s what The Ledger/NewsChief reported, and that’s what Chief Bird told me in a wide-ranging and incredibly open and frank discussion on Thursday.

Instead of a calm, unannounced lockdown drill in which police just went from room-to-room observing how teachers and students followed procedures, you had the officers injecting some sort of live action role they thought appropriate because of the summer drill. It’s still not clear to me if they were pretending to be the bad guy, or pretending to be police in an agitated situation. If it’s the second, it’s hard to imagine what they were even trying to accomplish. It defies common sense, a fact Chief Bird readily acknowledged. But drama has a way of getting in the brain.

“You have to put yourself in their mindset,” Bird told me. Not as an excuse; as an explanation. It’s obvious he’s been thinking very hard about how this happened — and how to prevent it in the future.

Society at large — and Polk schools and law enforcement in particular — have placed enormous emphasis on school/mass shootings as a concept/boogeyman. In this case, the school district’s school safety unit ordered a countywide drill program that gave individual resource officers the responsibility for organizing and conducting drills at individual schools. In the real world, that gave these officers far, far too much discretion in addressing a subject that causes social panic.

(I’m going to come back to this question of fraught police discretion in a different post because it’s hugely important in understanding why the Drug War is an ongoing disaster for our country — and why police relationships with the public the serve are seem frayed in many communities.)

Was Jacquelyn Moore damned-if-she-did and damned-if-she-didn’t?

How does all this interact with Principal Jacquelyn Moore’s role, for which Supt. Kathryn LeRoy suspended her with pay? That’s a far harsher punishment than the simple transfer out of the school that the resource officer received.

Chief Bird did not want to comment on Moore’s role, citing the ongoing School District investigation. But he did say, in a general sense, that it’s natural for a principal or any civilian in a school to defer to the judgement and authority of a police officer in a matter of security.

Bird’s general point about the relationship between civilian and police power dovetails rather perfectly with a message from one of the many teachers with whom I have regular contact. I received this about an hour after I broke the news of Jacqueline Moore’s suspension.

All principals have been told to cooperate with law enforcement as they “prepare us” for an active shooter event. She is going to make that woman her scapegoat. It is apalling. This situation is happening a varying scales at different schools. I recently heard a police officer tell a group of teachers that the police were holding a drill and walked by a room and could see the kids and they went into the room and told all of the kids that they would be dead. Teachers are conditioned to be quiet. Everyone of us were thinking “you don’t know how to work with children”. SMH.

Chief Bird himself told me that officers have used the “you’d be dead now” line or something similar on teachers or students who didn’t follow the lockdown protocols — the content of which is unclear to me. I don’t want to get into a debate over that approach in today’s post. (I’m going to talk about what I consider the overall futility and theater of these drills at a different time.) We can all agree that it’s different than having guns drawn; but I think we can also agree that “you’d be dead now” is still quite aggressive. And it’s easy for me to see how that sense of aggression could spill over into what the officers decided to do at Jewett.

The message from the teacher went on to say:

This superintendent rules with bully tactics and by fear. And so do a lot of her “people.” You aren’t going to hear much from teachers anymore, unless they are about to retire or quit. Which many of the best ones are about to do.

This district has changed so much in the last year. Everyone is a afraid not to do LeRoy’s bidding, but the problem is… It is hard to know what that is exactly….

She had so many minions running around giving conflicting information… bad information, or no information at all.

Communication is horrible!

They have gotten rid of everyone who served this district for years and were home grown here.

Many people thought there was a good ole boy/girl club, but they were decent people who wanted to help and support the schools. No one knows who to call for answers anymore. Everyone at the top are strangers who don’t seem to have any real interest in the most important resource, the people.

Morale across the district is at an all time low. I could give you an earful. In fact, any educator could.

It is very bad. I feel like I am taking a huge risk by even talking like this… Okay. I’m off the soap box. Thanks for listening, if you read this.

One always has to be careful when publishing and assessing these types of emails in dealing with an organization as large and diverse as the Polk School System. No superintendent can possibly please everyone; and sometimes gripes are just gripes. Moreover, I have never worked in any organization in which the rank and file praised communication from their leaders. Ever. It is the go-to complaint of every workforce.

However, I have to say that this message is consistent with the tenor and content of complaints I’ve heard from other teachers and educators about LeRoy’s administration since she took office. It boils down to a combination of heavy-handedness and organizational distance and confusion. I did not hear this specific type of complaint about her predecessors. Their complaints were different. I haven’t written anything about LeRoy until now because I didn’t have any particular incident or job performance issue through which I could assess it.

But if this message is remotely correct about the combination of authoritarianism and confusion in LeRoy’s administration, it’s not that hard to draw a line from that combination to what happened at Jewett. (For the record, I sent a portion of this message, but not all of it, to LeRoy for comment. She said responded — pleasantly — that she wouldn’t talk about it further until the school district’s internal investigation runs its course.)

So let me ask you this about Jacquelyn Moore.

If this message is remotely true, do you think there is any chance she would defy both the police themselves and the directives of her boss to thwart the drill? On a matter of security? Let me put it a different way. If she had thrown a fit and stopped the officers, would she have been punished for insubordination? It’s a completely legitimate question. And it reflects a truism of organizational management: you never get credit for what doesn’t happen. But you often get blame for what does.

A leader is the face and voice of an organization

I don’t post that note as a gotcha. I’m not in that business. And I don’t have any personal beef with LeRoy. I was actually quite impressed that she sat down to answer my questions as fully as she did. I want the School District to thrive as best it can. I want her to succeed: and I don’t have the power to get her fired, even if I wanted to.

But I think she and her administration need to hear that message. It’s detailed. And direct. School district leadership needs to see it in relation to what’s happened here. If leaders want their subordinates to use good judgement, not just acquiesce to power, they have to make them feel secure enough to use good judgement. So I ask again: Do you think Jacquelyn Moore felt empowered to use her best judgement in this case? Do the Jewett events themselves seem quite consistent with the management pathologies that my teacher correspondent claims?

With that in mind, let’s look at the difference between how the Winter Haven Police Department, under Bird’s leadership, and the School District, under LeRoy’s leadership, addressed this after it happened.

First of all, Bird stood up on camera the day of drill and took the heat — alone — from a local news station. Of the leaders involved, he was arguably the person least responsible for what happened. But his officers carried out the drill, so he stood up and took responsibility for it. Alone. And he made a mistake by saying this:

“It’s very important that, when you do your drill, you do it without everyone knowing that it’s a drill. How you train and how you prepare is how you’re going to react when everything goes bad.”

Bird told me later that he was talking about the unannounced part and not the guns and role-playing part; but the effect, which I now believe was unintentional, was to trivialize people’s concerns.

Bird read that piece, and he was still willing to talk openly to me about what happened. That speaks well of him. The point of the “prosecution” line was to emphasize the urgency of this and demand some accountability when none appeared forthcoming. As I understand it, Bird has spent the last few days answering questions and explaining to anyone in his community who will listen what happened. Can you imagine Lisa Womack behaving similarly? She might still have a job.

It does not speak as well of the School District and the Polk Sheriff’s Office that they left Bird dangling in the wind, especially because the order for the drill came from the District’s Safe Schools program which is a joint PCSO/School District initiative.

Indeed, LeRoy’s inexplicable multi-day delay in even publicly acknowledging something happened is baffling. I’m not talking about an immediate definitive statement. I’m talking about something akin to, “I have seen the media report. It concerns me. But I want to find out precisely what happened before I comment.” She should have said that at the same time Chief Bird was making his first statement. And then she should have made it a priority to find out and communicate what happened.

Instead, the School District organization, through one of its spokespeople, said this: “We don’t want students to be scared, but we need them to be safe. Unfortunately, no one gets an advanced notice of real life emergencies.”

And then it went silent for days. That’s not good enough. Not close to good enough. And no one should blame that on the spokesperson, whose job it is to communicate the district position. Leaders set the position; flacks repeat it. That position stood for an entire weekend. It wasn’t until Monday night that LeRoy addressed the drill and announced Moore’s suspension. Maybe my questions from Monday morning had an effect; maybe they didn’t. Who knows? But in any event, LeRoy’s first public comment on the drill should not have come almost 96 hours after the drill happened. By that time, an unfortunate confluence of errors had become a pretty significant scandal for multiple institutions.

There’s another difference that’s telling to me: Bird simply asked his resource officer what happened and got a detailed account. And he and his spokespeople have been freely telling that story, which puts most of the “blame” on his own officers. He didn’t declare any kind of internal investigation that prevents him from documenting and explaining their behavior to the public. I’m not at all sure why the school district needs a formal investigation. I would think one conference call with the key players would be enough. It’s not like Jacquelyn Moore is a union employee.

Anyway, this was bad. Middle school is a fraught age. I hope the Jewett staff is keeping a close eye on its kids. Children have complex and varied psychologies. Some will completely laugh it off; some won’t.

And I hope that it forces some soul-searching at all levels about how leaders communicate the importance of judgement to their subordinates — and how they respond when that judgement falls short.

]]>Credit where due, Polk Supt. Kathryn LeRoy (I understand she goes by Kathy; I’ve used both) answered the pointed questions I asked in yesterday’s post about the ill-fated drill at Jewett Middle Magnet. I don’t have time to parse them right now; but I will. But I wanted to get her answers up in their entirety. She obviously spent some time on them. My publishing them does not imply approval of anything. I will have more.

Here are the questions and answers:

1. Does LeRoy agree that this “drill” was stupid, irresponsible, and completely unnecessary?

I believe conducting a drill with officers having weapons in their hands is unnecessary, ill-advised and demonstrated that school administration at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet, which was responsible for the coordination of this drill, exhibited a lack of good judgment and did not have a clear understanding of how the drill should be conducted.

My Department of Safe Schools requested that routine lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools. This request did not call for an “active shooter drill,” and did not include that officers should have weapons in their hands.

Since last month’s request, lockdown drills were conducted at more than 80 schools without incident.
In fact, over the last few years, lockdown drills have taken place throughout Polk County without incident.

Capt. Loyd Stewart, director of the Polk County School District’s Department of Safe Schools, and I did not become aware of how the drill was conducted at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet until after it was completed.

The principal has been suspended pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

The Department of Safe Schools is also conducting a thorough review of what took place.
We regret the stress, worry and concern that any students, parents and school staff members experienced in how this drill was conducted. Please understand our intention with any drill is to better prepare our students and staff for emergency situations. They are not meant to frighten them as the drill did last week at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet.

Capt. Stewart immediately contacted Winter Haven Police Department to ensure officers would not have weapons in their hands in future drills.

Other law enforcement agencies providing school resource officers have been contacted. They are aware that weapons should never be in the hands of officers during drills with students and staff members present.

In an effort to provide greater clarity, we have stressed some key points to our school administrators when it comes to conducting a drill including:

At the onset of the drill, the school administrator should announce: “This is a drill.”
A message should be sent to parents, at the onset of the drill, to let them know that a lockdown drill is taking place.

Staff will be assigned to answer phones and let callers know that there is no threat to the campus and it is a drill. A staff member should be at the school’s entrance to let visitors know that a drill is taking place and they cannot enter until the drill is done.

2. Can LeRoy name any other American school district that has run a live shooter school drill with armed men without telling the children or their teachers?
I am not aware of any. We do not have “active shooter drills” in Polk County. We have routine lockdown drills that can address a variety of circumstances – from bad weather and dangerous conditions near a school to a live shooter event. Drills do not require officers or deputies to display weapons.

Again, the Department of Safe Schools requested that lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools. This request did not call for an “active shooter drill,” and did not include that officers should have weapons in their hands. We very much regret that this took place, and we immediately acted to ensure this would not happen again.

3. Who ordered the drill? Did this person run it by LeRoy for approval?

Capt. Stewart requested that routine lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools.

Capt. Stewart requested that school resource officers and school resource deputies provide training to all staff on lockdown procedures. They were also asked to work with school administration to observe a lockdown drill and evaluate the outcome. The lockdown drill was meant to familiarize students and staff with various safety procedures.

He did not tell officers or deputies to have weapons in their hands as they observed and evaluated whether safety procedures were being followed.

4. If not, when did she learn about it?

Capt. Stewart and I were not made aware of how the drill was conducted at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet until after it took place.

5. What role did Polk Sheriff’s Capt. Loyd Stewart play? LeRoy recently contracted with Stewart to serve as liaison between the Polk Sheriff’s Office and the School District. Winter Haven police carried out the Jewett mock execution. But did they get Stewart’s approval ahead of time?

“The purpose for bringing me on was not to have law enforcement more involved in day-to-day operations; the purpose was that I have a big-picture perspective for safety issues,” Stewart said.

“I’m not here to be a police officer for the School Board. I’m certainly not here to be an investigator of crimes. I’m more involved with planning, evaluating, implementing, testing, training and reviewing the system from a safety perspective.”

LeRoy said state legislators have asked her about the partnership, interested in how it works. She said she doesn’t know of any other districts in Florida that have such a partnership.

“The problem is, with all the safety concerns that school districts naturally have, and the school shootings that have happened around the country, we thought it was important to have someone with law enforcement perspective in that position,” LeRoy said.

Hmmmm, that certainly sounds like the “drill” would have fallen under Stewart’s purview — and for that matter under Sheriff Grady Judd’s. Stewart and Judd have been awfully quiet — just like LeRoy. But if Stewart is planner of school safety strategy, isn’t it awfully cowardly to let the Winter Haven police chief take the heat all by himself?

Again, Capt. Stewart requested that lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools. He did not ask for anything like an “active shooter drill” to be conducted.

There is obviously a lack of good judgment on the part of the school administration at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet. Capt. Stewart has taken steps to clarify how drills are to be conducted in the future.

No. Again, we do not have “active shooter drills” in Polk County. We believe lockdown drills are an important component of any school system’s safety plan. These drills address a variety of emergency situations. They ensure students and staff know what to do when a lockdown is called. We cannot provide advanced warning because we need to evaluate whether everyone knows what to do without having a chance to prepare in advance. However, these drills do not call for officers to have weapons in their hands.

7) Does LeRoy — or Stewart or WHPD Chief Charlie Bird — have children? Have they ever created an educational situation in which their children had a legitimate expectation of being shot by an assailant?

I cannot speak for Capt. Stewart or Chief Bird. I have two sons. The answer to your question is no. They took part in routine drills in their schools growing up. I believe these drills were important in preparing them for any emergency that might take place at their schools.

This took place before my start as Superintendent. I address matters that take place during my tenure.

9) Does LeRoy agree that simulating for pre-adolescent children the sensation of imminent violent death in their school is far more damaging than anything Kiera Wilmot’s silly little science experiment could have ever done?

A drill not being conducted properly concerns me, and I will address it. I cannot say that a student discipline matter that took place prior to my hiring will impact my decision. I don’t see the correlation between these two events. I would like to think that I am judged on my decisions and my choices in the situations that I am faced with as Superintendent.

10) Is there any possibility of consequences for any of the adults who call themselves leaders, but who have compounded astonishingly awful judgement with cowardly self-protective silence? I’ll try not to laugh when I ask the final question.

I act swiftly but only after calm deliberation and when I possess all of the information necessary to make a decision. This situation will be no different. The Department of Safe Schools is conducting a thorough review of what took place and will report to me. The principal has been suspended pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

Wade showed up at the City Commission again on Monday to have himself a pity party about lying about the sexual virtue of black girls and to defend his take on the general near animal status of the black people he claims to see. No need to rehash. Here’s my original piece on Wade’s original performance. Here’s the link to the Monday performance. It’s a carnival of self-pity and racially charged mania in which Ferguson somehow makes an appearance on the streets of Lakeland. I don’t know; honestly, it’s hard to follow. But at all times he blames everyone but himself, sounding very much like the welfare queens of fantasies. Anyway, I feel sorry for Wade in many ways; and I would ignore this if not for three small points:

1) He threatened me. And presumably my family. And he’s never addressed it.

2) He is a victim advocate for the Lakeland Police Department, with whatever imprimatur of state power that provides him.

3) Mayor Howard Wiggs thinks that is super-awesome. Wade asked Monday if the city wanted him to stay on as a victim advocate; Wiggs said definitely. “You had no malice in your heart,” Wiggs said at one point.

Does this convey malice, mayor?

If not, what does it convey? It’s not like this was a secret. The post I wrote about the threat “reached” 3,300 people on Facebook; and I sent links to the City Commission. Did you think I would forget about it? Threats tend to focus the mind.

So what did Mayor Wiggs say Monday to the guy who asked me: “Have you looked over your shoulder lately or behind you, and are you afraid of the dark?”

Wiggs said this: “The community needs more folks like you.”

Perhaps the community does; but I wonder about the victim advocate program. I’m not sure what the behavioral guidelines for a victim advocate are, but I’m pretty sure that addressing critics with lines borrowed from vampire movies is frowned upon. And here’s an interesting question: If Steve Wade catches me not looking over my shoulder in the dark some day and makes me or my family his victim, will he then get to advocate for us? Hell, it almost creates an incentive.

What’s the moral of all this? Nothing. There are no morals, really; only choices. You can’t glad hand everybody all the time, mayor. A lot of people know Steve Wade. So it’s unpleasant to say to him directly, “You’re a racially twisted crackpot who lies and threatens people. Go away.” It’s a lot easier just to say, “You have no malice in your heart” and hope nobody sees it. Especially because a lot of people agree with everything Steve Wade says and does. That’s a fact. They just lack his courage of speaking his convictions about all those almost animalistic black people and their slutty girls.

]]>Can you imagine Eileen Holden or Tom Phillips hiding behind their flacks over an issue of deadly seriousness that occurred at a facility under their command?

We’re going on 5 days since the mock execution at Jewett. The Ledger, inexplicably, hasn’t managed to get the leader of Polk School District on record about this great WTF moment. Come on, guys. Lord, there is nothing more contemptible than highly paid, organizational cowardice. Even in its hobbled state, the Ledger should be able to do something about that in this case.

LeRoy’s silence doesn’t mean other very well known people across the country aren’t talking about it. See Radley Balko — arguably America’s smartest and most serious observer of police — and Vice below.

I am hereby requesting an interview with Leroy. I have no interest in talking to Leah Lauderdale or Jason Geary, the school district’s spokespeople, but hopefully they can convey my request. Here are some of my questions for LeRoy in advance. I reserve the right to ask more.

1. Does LeRoy agree that this “drill” was stupid, irresponsible, and completely unnecessary?

I believe conducting a drill with officers having weapons in their hands is unnecessary, ill-advised and demonstrated that school administration at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet, which was responsible for the coordination of this drill, exhibited a lack of good judgment and did not have a clear understanding of how the drill should be conducted.

My Department of Safe Schools requested that routine lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools. This request did not call for an “active shooter drill,” and did not include that officers should have weapons in their hands.

Since last month’s request, lockdown drills were conducted at more than 80 schools without incident.
In fact, over the last few years, lockdown drills have taken place throughout Polk County without incident.

Capt. Loyd Stewart, director of the Polk County School District’s Department of Safe Schools, and I did not become aware of how the drill was conducted at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet until after it was completed.

The principal has been suspended pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
The Department of Safe Schools is also conducting a thorough review of what took place.
We regret the stress, worry and concern that any students, parents and school staff members experienced in how this drill was conducted. Please understand our intention with any drill is to better prepare our students and staff for emergency situations. They are not meant to frighten them as the drill did last week at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet.

Capt. Stewart immediately contacted Winter Haven Police Department to ensure officers would not have weapons in their hands in future drills.

Other law enforcement agencies providing school resource officers have been contacted. They are aware that weapons should never be in the hands of officers during drills with students and staff members present.

In an effort to provide greater clarity, we have stressed some key points to our school administrators when it comes to conducting a drill including:
At the onset of the drill, the school administrator should announce: “This is a drill.”
A message should be sent to parents, at the onset of the drill, to let them know that a lockdown drill is taking place.

Staff will be assigned to answer phones and let callers know that there is no threat to the campus and it is a drill. A staff member should be at the school’s entrance to let visitors know that a drill is taking place and they cannot enter until the drill is done.

2. Can LeRoy name any other American school district that has run a live shooter school drill with armed men without telling the children or their teachers?
I am not aware of any. We do not have “active shooter drills” in Polk County. We have routine lockdown drills that can address a variety of circumstances – from bad weather and dangerous conditions near a school to a live shooter event. Drills do not require officers or deputies to display weapons.

Again, the Department of Safe Schools requested that lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools. This request did not call for an “active shooter drill,” and did not include that officers should have weapons in their hands. We very much regret that this took place, and we immediately acted to ensure this would not happen again.

3. Who ordered the drill? Did this person run it by LeRoy for approval?

Capt. Stewart requested that routine lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools.

Capt. Stewart requested that school resource officers and school resource deputies provide training to all staff on lockdown procedures. They were also asked to work with school administration to observe a lockdown drill and evaluate the outcome. The lockdown drill was meant to familiarize students and staff with various safety procedures.

He did not tell officers or deputies to have weapons in their hands as they observed and evaluated whether safety procedures were being followed.

4. If not, when did she learn about it?

Capt. Stewart and I were not made aware of how the drill was conducted at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet until after it took place.

5. What role did Polk Sheriff’s Capt. Loyd Stewart play? LeRoy recently contracted with Stewart to serve as liaison between the Polk Sheriff’s Office and the School District. Winter Haven police carried out the Jewett mock execution. But did they get Stewart’s approval ahead of time?

“The purpose for bringing me on was not to have law enforcement more involved in day-to-day operations; the purpose was that I have a big-picture perspective for safety issues,” Stewart said.

“I’m not here to be a police officer for the School Board. I’m certainly not here to be an investigator of crimes. I’m more involved with planning, evaluating, implementing, testing, training and reviewing the system from a safety perspective.”

LeRoy said state legislators have asked her about the partnership, interested in how it works. She said she doesn’t know of any other districts in Florida that have such a partnership.

“The problem is, with all the safety concerns that school districts naturally have, and the school shootings that have happened around the country, we thought it was important to have someone with law enforcement perspective in that position,” LeRoy said.

Hmmmm, that certainly sounds like the “drill” would have fallen under Stewart’s purview — and for that matter under Sheriff Grady Judd’s. Stewart and Judd have been awfully quiet — just like LeRoy. But if Stewart is planner of school safety strategy, isn’t it awfully cowardly to let the Winter Haven police chief take the heat all by himself?

Again, Capt. Stewart requested that lockdown drills be conducted at all our schools. He did not ask for anything like an “active shooter drill” to be conducted.

There is obviously a lack of good judgment on the part of the school administration at Jewett Middle Academy Magnet. Capt. Stewart has taken steps to clarify how drills are to be conducted in the future.

No. Again, we do not have “active shooter drills” in Polk County. We believe lockdown drills are an important component of any school system’s safety plan. These drills address a variety of emergency situations. They ensure students and staff know what to do when a lockdown is called. We cannot provide advanced warning because we need to evaluate whether everyone knows what to do without having a chance to prepare in advance. However, these drills do not call for officers to have weapons in their hands.

7) Does LeRoy — or Stewart or WHPD Chief Charlie Bird — have children? Have they ever created an educational situation in which their children had a legitimate expectation of being shot by an assailant?

I cannot speak for Capt. Stewart or Chief Bird. I have two sons. The answer to your question is no. They took part in routine drills in their schools growing up. I believe these drills were important in preparing them for any emergency that might take place at their schools.

This took place before my start as Superintendent. I address matters that take place during my tenure.

9) Does LeRoy agree that simulating for pre-adolescent children the sensation of imminent violent death in their school is far more damaging than anything Kiera Wilmot’s silly little science experiment could have ever done?

A drill not being conducted properly concerns me, and I will address it. I cannot say that a student discipline matter that took place prior to my hiring will impact my decision. I don’t see the correlation between these two events. I would like to think that I am judged on my decisions and my choices in the situations that I am faced with as Superintendent.

10) Is there any possibility of consequences for any of the adults who call themselves leaders, but who have compounded astonishingly awful judgement with cowardly self-protective silence? I’ll try not to laugh when I ask the final question.

I act swiftly but only after calm deliberation and when I possess all of the information necessary to make a decision. This situation will be no different. The Department of Safe Schools is conducting a thorough review of what took place and will report to me. The principal has been suspended pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

Middle school is terribly fraught to begin with. Now the kids get to endure mock executions — at 12. Grown men and women in war come home with debilitating trauma after being stalked by men with guns. What’s going to happen to these kids who were stalked and terrorized by out-of-control gun-toting SWAT buffoons? At 12.

How many kids’ relationships to school has been forever changed because of this malignant, apocalyptic idiocy?

This is state-sanctioned child abuse in every conceivable way. It’s a far more scarring type of child abuse than Adrian Peterson’s infant son allegedly endured from his dad’s switch. Jerry Hill should prosecute whoever greenlit this operation. That appears to be the Winter Haven police chief and the school principal.

Kathy Leroy needs to fire that principal before he/she can abuse any other kids with his negligence or sadism. And then Kathy Leroy needs to get on her knees and beg forgiveness from whoever will give it. If not, fire her too.

Key passage from TV story.

Students huddled into classrooms waiting for further instructions. Instead, they started hearing voices in the hallway.

“A lot of people started getting scared because we thought it was a real drill,” Lauren said. “We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us.”

Two police officers burst into Lauren’s classroom with their guns drawn — one carrying, what Winter Haven police said, was an AR-15 rifle. Lauren was so scared she texted her mother, Stacy Ray.

“I’m panicking because I’m thinking that it’s a legitimate shooter is coming, that something bad is happening at the school,” said Ray, who also received frightened text messages from her other children, including one that read, “I thought he was going to shoot me.”

Dear God.

What is the difference in doing that and a police officer putting a gun to kid’s head on the street so they learn how to behave in a robbery? Or put a knife to their throat so they know to behave when ISIS comes and gets us? Go ahead. Come up with an answer. I dare you.

If, God forbid, we lose the lottery and some gun nut comes charging into a school in this county, the death toll will depend 30 percent on how quickly teachers can lock doors, 30 percent on how quickly the cops get there, and 40 percent on blind ass luck or some crazy act of heroism by a kid or staff member.

Outside of telling kids to be quiet and listen to their teacher, there is no useful child training for a lockdown. And the dangers for which Winter Haven SWAT buffoons terrorized kids are not a fraction of the danger that kids endure every day simply by riding in a vehicle to school.

In the gun-crazy country that cops and gun nuts have built, we simply have to endure the tiny, tiny risk that a deranged 2nd amendment lover will murder our children in school. It’s the price of freedom — or something. Do you think it is now harder or easier for these kids to endure that tiny danger?

It’s bad enough that this tiny little danger lurks in the back of all our minds without SWAT buffoons and their enablers acting it out so they can play with their big war toys and make the kids cry. (Note to Lakeland Montessori: I’m a really low-maintenance parent; but don’t let anything remotely resembling this happen in our school. I will become a chair thrower.)

Somewhere, deep down, the people who did what they did yesterday just like terrorizing kids. It’s their idea of tough love or something. They are incapable of separating their TV/Call of Duty fantasies from life as lived. That judgement and pathology should be nowhere near a uniform or guns or children. Prosecute it, Jerry Hill. As an individual act, this is worse than anything LPD ever thought about doing during the scandal.

And fire the principal, Kathy Leroy; or fire yourself. As of now, you’re the superintendent who oversees mock executions of middle schoolers. You’re the superintendent whose middle schoolers thought they were going to die horribly in their place of learning. Do something about it.

]]>I’m about to go listen to one final debate on My Ride/Mr Roads. So I figured I would republish this on its own. Here are my top 7 reasons to support MR/MR:

1) The My Ride/My Roads plan is precisely what political conservatives claim they want: a meticulously planned, locally-designed, customized solution to a local challenge.

2) Polk Transit is extraordinarily well run. Even opponents — with the exception of the crazy person that Neil Combee plays on his Facebook page — acknowledge this.

3) Transportation to and from work, medical appointments, and school is an absolute necessity to access the economy and join/remain in the middle class. It is a massively progressive benefit. (“Progressive” meaning of greater benefit to lower income people)

4) The ability to live without a car is a massively progressive yearly tax cut.

5) Many of our kids need #s 3 and 4 desperately to build a life. We have wrecked their present with our irresponsibility and selfishness. We owe them the same public investment in their future that we enjoyed.

6) Good transit can keep uninsured and dangerous drivers off the road.